Create a web video page with preview

Creating the video

I assume you already have a video file and you want to build a web page to show it to your site visitors. There are a few major formats for displaying video on the web, Video For Windows (vfw), QuickTime, Real Media, MPEG and Flash video. Lately Flash video has turned into the dominant format since most users has the flash player installed and is available on most major platforms. In general you should Flash video for internet video.

Converting the video to Flash

Video Web Wizard is an easy way to convert your video file to Flash video format. The program will also create web page that you can upload to your server to show the video file. When the video has finished playing the generated page will direct visitors to a url you specify. There are a number of other tools available convert between video formats and you can consider video sharing sites for your videos if you can live with the limits set but the service.

Movie preview

If you want to show more than one video on your web page it is a good idea to extract video frames from the video file and show the extracted video frames as web page previews. Previews give your web visitors a quick overview of the videos just like thumbnails give faster loading of an image than a large image. Video previews are even more important since you can't get the complete context of a video from just one screenshot.
Use Fast video indexer to capture video frames and generate a preview page. Add link from the preview page to the actual movie.

Video report as a site preview

You can also use the report to generate an index page with several videos. Move all the videos to a folder on your local computer somewhere among your site folders. Start Fast video indexer and add all the videos to the project. Change the options you want to change and make sure you extract as jpeg images to somewhere in you site folder hierarchy. Next start the video frame capture to extract video frames. When capturing has completed go through the frames of all video and right click on all bad frames to remove them. When you are satisfied generate a html report and save the report in the same folder as the videos. The project preview will serve as a really nice preview showing the first few frames of each video with a link to the video.
The next step is to change the move link for each movie to the template saved by video web wizard. The generated report html page is very simply and easy to customize to your sites look and feel in Dreamweaver or another web page editor.
If you want you can also customize the report template to generate web video pages matching your site directly.